The origin of the lectures dates back to Richard Courant’s 70th birthday on January 8, 1958, when his friends established a fund to endow a series of Courant Lectures to be delivered every two years. Kurt Friedrichs, who was chosen to present the gift, stated:

“One may think that one of the roles mathematics plays in other sciences is that of providing law and order, rational organization and logical consistency, but that would not correspond to Courant's ideas. In fact, within mathematics proper Courant has always fought against overemphasis of the rational, logical, legalistic aspects of this science and emphasized the inventive and constructive, esthetic and even playful on the one hand and on the other hand those pertaining to reality. How mathematics can retain these qualities when it invades other sciences is an interesting and somewhat puzzling question. Here we hope our gift will help.”

In 2006, this venerable lecture series was re-invigorated through extremely generous endowment gifts from Dan Stroock, in memory of Alan M. Stroock, who was a long time supporter of NYU both financially and through his many years of service on the board of trustees, and by the Gopal Varadhan Foundation, established in memory of Mr. Varadhan, an alumnus of New York University, WSUC class of 1990, who lost his life in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The first speaker, in 1959, was Eugene Wigner, one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century. His talk, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” became quite famous and was subsequently published in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.